WHY DOLORES CHUMSKY HATES THOMAS EDISON

By Adam Goodheart

Dolores Chumsky's house leaks. There's no way to fix it. "Just try and
get someone to come and make repairs," laments the Union, N.J., resident.
"They may come in once, but they never come back."

That's because Chumsky's innocent-looking suburban residence is a
handyman's nightmare. It also stands as a monument to one of the most
colossal flops in the history of scientific innovation. It is one of a
dozen surviving examples of Thomas Edison's worst invention ever: the
single-piece cast-concrete house.

Edison's concrete houses aren't quite as well-known as, say, the
incandescent bulb, the phonograph, or the motion picture. Yet the
great inventor devoted nearly as much time and effort to them as he
did to any of his better-known discoveries. He even dreamt of a future
in which millions of Americans would not only live in concrete houses,
but also sleep on concrete beds, and play music on concrete pianos.

It was a classic case of one failure begetting another. In the late
1880s, Edison had turned to perfecting a new process for refining iron ore
using magnets and massive crushing rollers. The enterprise wasted more
than a decade of effort and several million dollars. But instead of
selling the equipment for scrap and calling it a day, the redoubtable
Edison decided to use the huge rollers to manufacture high-grade cement.

By 1906, four years after its opening, the cement plant, too, had become
a money pit. But if no one wanted his cement, the Wizard of Menlo Park
declared, he would create his own demand.

That August, in an after-dinner speech in New York City, Edison announced
his latest brainchild to the world. Concrete homes, he said, would
revolutionize American life. They would be fireproof, insect-proof, easy
to clean. The walls could be pre-tinted in attractive colors and would never
need to be repainted. Everything from shingles to bathtubs to picture frames
would be cast as a single monolith of concrete, in a process that took just
a few hours. Extra stories could be added with a simple adjustment of the
molding forms. Best of all, the $1,200-dollar houses would be cheap enough
for even the poorest slum-dwellers to afford.

Scarcely less extravagant were the claims of Edison's admirers. "The
time will most certainly come when whole houses will be turned out in one
piece," a biographer declared in 1907. When the molds were removed,
he wrote, "a solid and almost bomb-proof house will be left behind."

Because New Jersey has not yet been subjected to extensive bombardment,
the veracity of that statement is hard to test. In nearly every other
respect, however, Edison's early prototypes proved disastrous. Instead of
simple molds, the houses required nickel-plated iron forms containing more
than two thousand parts and weighing nearly half a million pounds. A
builder had to buy at least $175,000 in equipment before pouring a single
house. Furthermore, nobody wanted to live in a residence that had been
dubbed "the salvation of the slum dweller." Although Edison
optimistically described an early model as "in the style of Francois
I," it was more in the style of an oversized outhouse.

Undaunted, Edison announced that he was generously turning his invention
over, free, to anyone who wanted to help humanity. Building contractors
didn't exactly beat a path to his door. So in 1911, the inventor made
another go of it. This time, he announced, he had discovered a product
line for which concrete was ideally suited: home furnishings.

Using special lightweight "foam concrete," Edison proposed
the manufacture of concrete phonograph cabinets and concrete pianos.
Concrete bedroom sets -- more durable and beautiful than those "in
the most palatial residence in Paris or along the Rhine" --
would cost a mere five or six dollars. Edison even planned to market
concrete tombstones. "As to concrete dogs to stand warningly in
the front yard and concrete cats to purr stonily under a concrete
kitchen range, he made no announcement," noted the New York Times.

But the bubble burst quickly. Amid a flurry of press releases, Edison
shipped a pair of concrete phonograph consoles round trip to New Orleans
and Chicago. The crates were marked "Please drop and abuse this
package." Yet they never made it to their much-hyped appearance at
a trade show back in New York. Edison himself never appeared at the show,
and thereafter refused to discuss concrete furniture. Apparently, the
cabinets had arrived at their destination in somewhat more than one
piece.

Incredibly, despite such spectacular failures, the Edison Portland
Cement Company remained in business. It lost millions of dollars, went
bankrupt twice, and published a book with the unlikely title The
Romance of Cement. A few years after its founder's death in 1931,
the company closed for good. The ill-starred rolling machinery was
shipped off to a nitrate mine in Chile. All that remained of Thomas
Edison's malformed brainchild were a few yellowing patent claims --
and Dolores Chumsky's leaky house.